Although the number of homicides in the District of Columbia has increased since last year, the city is poised to post the second-lowest homicide rate in more than two decades.

With a week remaining in 2007, D.C. recorded 180 homicides this year. That is 11 more than last year when the city celebrated a precipitous drop in homicides, recording the lowest number of killings since before the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s and the second-lowest since 1966.